This Blog

There are 100 million young people in the Middle East and North Africa. They are a force for change in a region at a crossroads. This blog is focused on ideas for tapping into this immense potential and meeting the aspirations for jobs, justice and dignity.

Law and Regulation

Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Policy Program and the Center on Children and Families at Brookings released a study on multidimensional poverty and race in America. The study shows why it’s important to look at poverty through the dimensions of low household income, limited education, lack of health insurance, concentrated spatial poverty, and unemployment, and why we should consider ways to de-cluster and reduce the links between them.

With half the population of Syria forced from their homes as a result of the five-year-long civil war, now living either as refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs), many are asking, “Will we be able to return to our original homes?” Recent changes to the legal framework in Syria governing the sale and purchase of private land raise concerns—both for the protection of land owned or long-occupied by displaced persons and for the development of any post-conflict land restitution process. Such regulations may also compound post-conflict reform of land administration practices and bring uncertainty to one of the few economic assets of displaced households.

Like other vulnerable people, refugees are likely to encounter legal problems. These problems are often linked directly to their displacement, but also reflect general problems poor people encounter related to family, civil, and criminal matters. The longer a person’s displacement, the more legal problems that tend to arise, especially those problems that are less closely linked to displacement. And these problems begin to strain local institutions. The Ministry of Justice has reported increased caseloads of 84 percent in Mafraq, 77 percent in Irbid and 50 percent in Amman, all of which are areas with considerable refugee populations.

More than three years after the wave of revolutions that swept some countries of the Arab region, it is now possible to step back and make an initial assessment of the subsequent transformation processes. While the picture seems bleak overall, the prospects for Tunisia’s democratic transition, at the very least, offers some cause for hope. Among the many features of the Tunisian transition, one of the most significant is the country’s commitment to a process of a transitional justice (TJ). The process took three years to materialize, and required a joint effort on the part of many actors, ranging from national organizations to the international community, along with politicians and legal professionals.

The birthplace of the Arab Spring is sometimes described as the only democratic nation in the region of the Middle East and North Africa. In order to retain this distinction and uphold its new constitution, however, a legitimate voting process needs to be held this year.

As the job market in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region becomes increasingly global and competitive, young people with varying degrees of training and education find themselves struggling to find work. With half its population of 355 million under the age of 25, MENA has the second youngest regional population in the world after sub-Saharan Africa. If this social, economic, and academic malaise continues, a high proportion of the MENA region’s youth will be unable to leave home, get married, and develop independent lives.

I have just returned from London where I attended the seventh meeting of the Friends of Yemen (FoY) group. This group was created in 2010 to help support Yemen through a period of crisis. It is co-chaired by the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and Yemen itself, with 36 other members, including the United States and Russia.
At the meeting, members discussed how the international community would support Yemen to complete its political transition toward federalism, implement the outcome of its national dialogue—and lay the foundations for a democratic modern civil state.

Crony capitalism is the key development challenge facing Tunisia today

Last week’s Economist magazine focused on Crony Capitalism. From the powerful oil barons in the USA in the 1920s to today’s oligarchs in Russia and Ukraine, they show that such entrenched interests have been a major concern over time and around the globe. North Africa is no exception. The fortunes accumulated by the family and friends of President Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt were so obscene that they helped trigger the Arab Spring revolutions, with protestors demanding an end to corruption by the elite.

Last January, Egypt and Tunisia enacted new constitutions in the context of the political changes they have been witnessing since the 2011 revolutions that overthrew the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes. While most public attention has focused on how these constitutions have addressed hotly debated issues such as the structure of government, the role of religion and fundamental freedoms, there has been relatively less attention to how they have dealt with economic and social issues. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the two constitutions contain clauses which give high priority to building a knowledge economy and which provide for the protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs), at the constitutional level, for the first time in the history of these countries.

In last week's op-ed for the Washington Post, World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim provided the broader context for the Bank's concern about discrimination in general, and more specifically about anti-gay laws: "Institutionalized discrimination is bad for people and for societies. Widespread discrimination is also bad for economies. There is clear evidence that when societies enact laws that prevent productive people from fully participating in the workforce, economies suffer."